Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography

INTRODUCTION

THE ONCE AND FUTURE STAR

‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.’

– Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’, 1915

ON A June day in 1997, at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital, Scott M. Kessler MD started surgery on his patient’s throat. Removing a cyst seemed a relatively ordinary procedure, but there was nothing ordinary about the patient and everything extraordinary about the throat. For fifty years, the voice produced therein had given billions of people the sound of music.

Then suddenly, the rest was silence. Julie Andrews, the singing nun, would sing no more.

The vocal gift that had guided a bandy-legged little English girl from Walton-on-Thames on to the cinema screens of the world was gone for ever. And, in fighting back, the former Queen of Hollywood would need every scrap of the determination that had inspired one colleague to label her ‘a nun with a switchblade’.

‘I’ve got a good right hook,’ she once told me. I believed her.

* * *

‘Julie Andrews’, said Moss Hart, the director of her colossal stage hit My Fair Lady, ‘has that terrible English strength that makes you wonder why they lost India’. There can never be another career like hers. The music halls from which she sprang have disappeared. There are precious few screen musicals. And the values that shaped her talents are dead and gone.

It fell to Julie, by timing as much as talent, to buttress Old Hollywood against the winds of change. However, if the studio moguls saw her as their salvation, it was not long before they were disabused. In 1965, The Sound of Music rescued Twentieth Century Fox from bankruptcy. Three years later, Star! almost put the studio back under, and the leading lady of both films fell as spectacularly as she had risen. But, as a child of the London Blitz, this most unlikely film legend was always going to survive – and, in 2000, like a respectable London store, she was granted a royal badge of honour to stick on her front. As Dame Julie Andrews, she now had the best role of her career.

The critic David Thomson once called Julie’s career ‘evidence that people go to the cinema for reasons that escape me’. According to Sir Richard Attenborough, however, the reasons were obvious: ‘Julie Andrews is, quite simply, a phenomenon. She has probably brought more joy to more people than any other star of her generation.’ In the BBC’s 2002 line-up of The 100 Greatest Britons, she was voted into the top sixty, the only actress in the list. At the same time, the success of The Princess Diaries and Shrek 2 unexpectedly restored her as a serious commercial prospect – not bad for a lady whose film career was declared moribund thirty-five years earlier.

Wearing her three score years and ten lightly, Julie Andrews still convinces as a show-business Peter Pan. She has kept the figure of her salad days, standing 5ft 7in and weighing about one hundred and twenty pounds. Never a sex symbol (except perhaps to superannuated schoolboys), her long legs have always been rather too slim, her jaw slightly too strong, her size eight feet somewhat too large. Somewhere, too, is the very faintest hint of the gawky kid with the boss eye and teeth her mother once called ‘the sort that could be cleaned with her mouth shut’.

Yet she has always had a rare, vital beauty of her own. The retroussé nose still surprises, and the blue, blue eyes are as clear as ever. There are lines around them now, suiting her; otherwise, her skin is as smooth as her explanation for ageing so well: ‘I don’t think I’d get up in the morning and give an interview without being a little prepared. I wouldn’t want to frighten people . . . this business is all about image.’

And her image is as a triptych: Eliza Doolittle, Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp in, respectively, the biggest Broadway hit of its day, an Oscar-winning screen debut and the most profitable movie then made. But, marvellous though the parts were, they only ever showed one side of Julie. There was still a long, long way to run.

* * *

Julie Andrews left the stage door of the Marquis Theatre on Sunday 8 June 1997, ending a seventeen-month run in Victor/Victoria, the Broadway version of her last film hit. Unknowingly, she had also ended her musical career.

During her final months, the star had missed more than thirty performances, suffering from bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia. The most persistent of her troubles, despite repeated medication from the well-reputed Dr Kessler, nephew by marriage to the opera star Beverly Sills, related to her throat. Half a century of singing had inevitably taken its toll. As far back as 1956, triumphant in My Fair Lady, Julie had been ‘in a ragged state from night after night of belting’. In 1960, her tonsils had been removed, which seemed to stand her in good stead for decades to come. But, even at the zenith of her fame, she admitted, ‘singing has never been particularly easy for me.’

By the opening of Victor/Victoria on 25 October 1995, days after her sixtieth birthday, the long-term prospects for Julie’s voice had been depreciating for some while. And after almost six hundred performances of the show, she was in deep trouble; a cyst had appeared on the left side of her throat. But, very soon after the subsequent operation at Mount Sinai Hospital, Julie sensed something else was wrong. During the procedure, she later told Larry King on CNN, ‘a piece of my vocal cords was taken away . . . I get a kind of fried sound, and there are certain notes that just don’t appear. They don’t come.’

Over the next year, everyone was quiet. Everyone waited. At the end of 1998, the star and her husband of three decades, Blake Edwards, appeared to be at odds over the issue. ‘I don’t think she’ll sing again – it’s an absolute tragedy,’ he told Parade magazine in November. ‘She was told she’d be OK in six weeks, the voice would actually be better. It’s over a year, and if you heard it, you’d weep.’

The tabloid press said she was furious with him – a charge that Barbara Walters later put to her on ABC television. ‘I guess because I’m private, a very private person,’ said Julie, surprising nobody. ‘Blake is completely the opposite and he just says what he feels.’

Her friends were more circumspect. Robert Wise, the director of her greatest film success, confined himself to quoting publicly from a letter she had written him: ‘As always, the wretched press have overblown facts to such an extent that everybody thinks I’m practically at death’s door. So, dear friend . . . I think you know that I did have an operation on my vocal cords and certainly recovery has been very slow. . .

‘With time and perseverance,’ she hoped to sing again, ‘though perhaps not The Sound of Music.’

But, to Barbara Walters, Julie let the mask slip: ‘to not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice which I have done all my life . . . I think I would be totally devastated.’ And, if things stayed that way, ‘I think it will change something inside of me for ever.’

She went to therapy – but also bared her teeth. On 15 May 1999, the Guardian newspaper in England reported that Julie was considering action against the American magazine Globe, for publishing what her publicist Gene Schwam called the ‘blatantly false headline’ that she had checked in to the Sierra Tucson clinic in Arizona to combat a drug dependency problem.

In fact, declared her lawyers, the treatment in May 1999 had been for ‘guidance and management of emotional issues’ over problems with her voice and the recent death of ‘a beloved aunt who played a pivotal role in her childhood and professional development’. Aunt Joan, her mother’s younger sister, had lived to the end close to the leafy London suburb of Walton-on-Thames. It was Joan who had given her dance lessons in the studio in the grounds of their house. And it was Joan who, with Julie’s mother, had climbed out of poverty: just how far would shortly be discovered.

By August, Julie was still ‘in some kind of denial’ – which is as I found her, on the Isle of Man, filming Noël Coward’s comedy Relative Values. As slender as ever, and invigorated by her first big-screen project for many years, she confirmed she was not giving up the struggle: ‘It’s been – difficult; a major tragedy for me because I so adore singing, and came to adore it in the later part of my career. I don’t think I’ll get back to the coloratura, which I don’t need anyway, but I’m optimistic that a certain part of it will return.’

But her frustration was evident. I asked if she would ever really sing again – even in private. ‘I’ll make the decision in private,’ she said sharply, her famously blue eyes glinting, and not with tears.

Later that August, on the island in the middle of the Irish Sea, she witnessed the total solar eclipse that travelled over Europe. Never a visibly religious woman, she admitted sensing ‘forces, way, way out there mysteriously keeping the world in a kind of balance. I thought, Ah, there must be a God.’ As filming went on, she became more and more introspective: ‘The thing with the voice was very devastating – is very devastating . . . It has been my stock-in-trade, something I could always go back to. And now I’m asking, Who am I? What do I do?’

Four months later, she had decided. On 14 December 1999, days from her appointment as a Dame of the British Empire, the sixty-four-year-old star filed a malpractice suit against Dr Kessler, his assistant Jeffrey D. Libin and Mount Sinai Hospital, claiming she was ‘precluded from practising her profession as a musical performer’ and reportedly asking for substantial damages, to compensate for loss of earnings. She had not been warned of ‘irreversible loss of vocal quality’, claimed the lawsuit, which also accused the doctor of operating on both sides of her vocal cords, when the right side had not required it.

On Tuesday 12 September 2000, the case was scheduled for the Federal District Court, Manhattan. An out-of-court settlement, reached in August, specified that terms should not be disclosed. However, at the end of October, the London Evening Standard declared that Julie Andrews had won up to £20 million in compensation. But no amount of money could restore the voice.

While her voice had guaranteed success on stage, on screen it was her personality that shone, as Robert Wise described it, ‘right through the camera, on to the film and out to the audience’. The results had been sensational. In 1964, Mary Poppins became Walt Disney’s biggest-ever hit. A year later, The Sound of Music became the biggest hit of all time. Two years after that, Thoroughly Modern Millie completed a hat-trick of musical success. But, unlike the voice, the ‘squeaky-clean image’ would prove indestructible.

Battling vainly against that image, the world’s top star jumped into bed with Paul Newman in Torn Curtain, gave agonising birth in Hawaii – and knocked back the gin, using what one critic called a ‘mule-skinner vocabulary’, in Star!. ‘Being wholesome can sometimes be a pest,’ she mused on the set of the latter film, almost anticipating its disaster, ‘but I’m stuck with it, I’m afraid.’ Even a strip-tease routine in Darling Lili, her first film for Blake Edwards, could not prevent it opening in 1970 to appalling business, putting a temporary halt to their Hollywood careers.

In Swiss exile, festering from the fallout, Blake wrote S.O.B. (Standard Operational Bullshit, ‘a phrase Blake and I use all the time’, said Julie, in case her fan base was not disheartened enough already). A decade later, they filmed it: Blake’s autobiographical picture of a scabrous, vindictive Hollywood, in which a film director, ostracised for making a colossal musical flop with his adorable wife, turns it into a piece of soft-core erotica. ‘I’ve got to show my boobies,’ breathes Julie’s character, parting her gown rather like a countess opening her stately home. ‘Are they worth showing?’

The answer, irrespective of her assets, was in the lacklustre returns of S.O.B. at the box office. The plot to kill the singing nun had been made in earnest, but, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of her death were greatly exaggerated. Reviewing S.O.B. on the Tonight show, Johnny Carson thanked Julie for ‘showing us that the hills are still alive’.

‘This quality she has got, call it wholesomeness if you like, was born in her; she’ll never lose it,’ Julie’s childhood agent Charles Tucker once said. ‘There’s an indefinable something about her personality that makes her unlike any other girl in the world. The remarkable thing is that it comes out on the screen. Julie’s no character actress. She will always play Julie Andrews. But no one can come within fifty million miles of her in a musical.’

Finally, by the dawn of the year 2001, it seemed that Julie Andrews had made peace with her image. Going back to Disney Studios, where she had filmed Mary Poppins, she made her most successful film in a very long time. The Princess Diaries proved to be the sleeper hit of the year, grossing over $100 million. But her principal trademark, the voice of mountain spring purity, was gone, as astonishingly as it had first appeared.

‘The fact that they discovered that I could sing was a miracle,’ said Julie, ‘because I didn’t inherit my voice from my stepfather and my real father didn’t sing, so we wondered where it came from.’ She would find out more – eventually.

CHAPTER ONE

WEATHER AND TIDE PERMITTING

‘You could call it tradition. You could call it good manners. You could call it knowing how to work hard, but I call it discipline. If you have that, you can really take off’

– Julie Andrews, 2000

JULIA ELIZABETH Wells entered the world at six o’clock in the morning of Tuesday 1 October 1935, at Rodney House Maternity Home, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. The healthy eight-pound baby, named after her grandmothers Julia Morris and Elizabeth Wells, was born under the star sign of the Balancing Scales, indicating what she later defined to me as her ‘typically Libran’ ambivalence. Other characteristics – ruthless objectivity, a horror of confrontation, maintaining a positive outlook – would not be long in developing. Given the childhood in store for her, baby Julia would need them all.

At the height of Julie worship in the 1960s, an astrologer at the London Daily Express, given only the time and date of her birth, concluded of the mystery subject:

This woman is a fundamentally an idealistic person, and one who has a basic compulsion for harmony. She will perpetually strive to ‘strike a balance’ – in her activities, relationships, aspirations.

She will have a streak of reserve, due to shyness and lack of complete self-confidence; thus, she will assume a mask of apparent self-assurance which she does not actually possess . . . The personality she reveals to the world at large will be charming, friendly and seemingly rather naïve, but there is a part of herself which she never reveals – not so much because of a desire to deceive others, but due to her shyness and sensitivity.

Blake Edwards later confirmed this aspect of his wife: ‘She’s still finding out about herself. She’s a good lady. But she’s shy.’

In one of the most negative articles ever written about Julie, Esquire journalist Helen Lawrenson thought otherwise, defining her as having ‘a background not customarily compatible with reticence and timidity’. But there was never anything remotely customary about Julie Andrews, in personality or circumstance. Her abilities came not from her stars, but from the widely disparate natures of her parents: practical common sense from her father, and – more than she knew – artistic brilliance through her mother’s line.

Her father, Ted Wells, the son of a carpenter, was a handicrafts schoolteacher, a quiet romantic with a deep love of poetry and the English countryside – passions he would pass on to his daughter. Winning a scholarship to Tiffin School in Kingston-upon-Thames, Ted had gained an excellent basic education, but could ill afford further study. After six years, he took up an apprenticeship with a local construction company, specialising in the production of transformers: there, he fell in love with a vivacious redhead of seventeen named Barbara Morris.

In complete contrast to Ted, Barbara was a larger-than-life show-business personality, helping her sister Joan run a local dance school while pursuing a career as a popular pianist. Julie was taught to sing and dance – ‘almost from the time I could toddle’ – but Barbara would play even more of a key role in her daughter’s career after marrying her second husband, Julie’s stepfather Ted Andrews.

This much was well-documented family history, to which Julie would always have a characteristically well-versed set of responses. Yet her lineage was more disturbing, so well hidden that she was sixty-seven before she learned the story of her maternal grandparents. Only then could she fully understand her mother’s frustration and later alcoholism – and, perhaps, know herself rather better too.

On Saturday 3 July 1976, a letter appeared in the South Yorkshire Times. Jim MacFarlane, of the University of Sheffield, had tried to research an almost forgotten local hero, commonly known as ‘The Pitman’s Poet’. He knew the best-known examples of the writer’s work but little else, merely that the poet had left South Yorkshire in the inter-war years and that his daughter Barbara had, he said, been ‘a very good piano player’ – just as Julie would later describe her mother as ‘a fine pianist’.

MacFarlane made the connection for himself. ‘Arthur Morris, our Celebrated Colliery Deputy Artiste,’ he wrote, ‘had another claim to fame – as the grandfather of Julie Andrews, actress.’

At the time nobody seemed very interested. In 1976, Julie Andrews had been absent from the big screen for six years (with the exception of a low-budget thriller made by Blake Edwards – himself at a low ebb – two years earlier). Her much-vaunted television series had been axed after only one season. Even so, there was a remarkable lack of effort to contact the coal miner’s granddaughter.

Then, over a quarter of a century later, came sensational revelations from the research of a Yorkshire solicitor, Giles Brearley, into the history of his coal-mining community. A keen historian in his spare time, Brearley had happened upon the same pieces of Morris’s poetry. He recognised them as exceptional, capturing the desperate dignity of the coal mining towns in the early decades of the twentieth century. Brearley was determined to piece together the life of Arthur Morris. After endless hours spent trawling through archives, he succeeded, and in 2004 published his fascinating book The Pitman’s Poet.

Morris, a gregarious fellow with a fine speaking voice, had been a popular character in the mining villages of South Yorkshire, going from door to door, enveloped in a black cloak, to recite his poems. A book of his early work – containing ‘The Miner’s ABC’, a definition of the collier’s lot – was sent to King George V. In 1924, one of his poems, ‘Wembley Colliery’, exposed the resentment felt by many pit families at the sanitised model colliery built for the British Empire Exhibition:

Then hats off to our miners all and hats off to their wives,

They never know from day to day, ’ere they may lose their lives.

And do not think our collieries are quite so danger free

As the perfect ideal pit you’ve seen called Wembley Colliery.

When, in 2003, Brearley wrote to Julie with the new-found information, she sent her half-brother up to Yorkshire to ‘make sure’ of him. ‘You know what sisters are like,’ Christopher Andrews explained.

‘It was amazing that Julie knew nothing of Arthur’s achievements,’ Brearley told me later. ‘I was astounded, when Chris came to visit, that the school where his mother had had so much happiness was unknown to him. He did not even know where she was schooled.’

I asked Julie’s other half-brother Donald if the news made sense of unexplained family issues. ‘I can’t be specific,’ he replied, slowly, ‘but some pieces of the jigsaw would certainly fit into place.’

On a Christmas trip to London, Julie hosted a family gathering at the Dorchester Hotel. So voluble was she about the discovery that Christopher had to remind her, ‘Remember, Jules, he’s my grandfather too.’

Previously, all that Julie knew of her grandfather was that he had served in the army. In a magazine article of 1958, she had written of him as ‘a fine musician . . . a drum major in the Grenadier Guards’ – but ‘never on the stage’. But Giles Brearley’s real discovery had less to do with Morris’s work than with his life – a dramatically chequered existence, culminating in a tragic and sordid end. Barbara had died in 1984, Joan fifteen years later, keeping the full, unexpurgated story to themselves. ‘Obviously the trauma felt by her mother and aunt was very deep indeed,’ Brearley told me. ‘Their formative years were just blotted out from memory.’ Their father had been a convict and – as I confirmed for myself – both parents had died horrible deaths.

William Arthur Morris was born in 1886, possibly illegitimate, to a working-class family in the railway town of Wolverton, Buckinghamshire. Quitting his first job as a barber, he joined the Army as a volunteer in 1909 and was posted to Caterham Barracks in Surrey, where he completed training as a guardsman. The tall, handsome young soldier became friendly with a twenty-two-year-old maid from north-west Surrey. Julia Mary Ward was the daughter of a gardener from Stratford-upon-Avon, whose family had moved shortly after her birth to Hersham (then a village, later a suburb of Walton-on-Thames) to live next door to the local laundry, at Gable Cottage in Rydens Grove.

Julia, susceptible to Arthur’s easy way with words, soon fell pregnant. The couple were married on 28 February 1910, one month after Arthur decided to extend his military service for another seven years, and one month before he was promoted to lance corporal. On 25 July, their first daughter, Barbara, was born.

According to Giles Brearley, five days later, Arthur Morris and his new family disappeared, absent without leave. It was over a year before the Army caught up with him. At a local Bonfire Night gathering on 5 November 1912, he was spotted and arrested. Branded a deserter, he faced a court martial, and on 18 November was thrown into the cells of Caterham Barracks, where his military career had commenced with such promise.

After a month behind bars, he was discharged on compassionate grounds, to provide for his wife and baby. Starting anew, Arthur joined the Shakespeare Colliery near Canterbury and rose remarkably quickly to the position of pit deputy, thus being exempt from the First World War call-to-arms. A second daughter, Joan, was born in 1915 – and Arthur, clearly uncomfortable with parental responsibility, disappeared once more.

In his book, Brearley traces Arthur’s path north, where he took up work as a pit deputy in the more profitable coal mines of South Yorkshire. His family joined him at Denaby Colliery, outside Doncaster, where they integrated well. Joan was more reserved than her vivacious elder sister Barbara, who was, by all accounts, a happy and confident child, highly proficient at the school piano.

Arthur became a key member of the local charitable lodges. Taking part in their concerts, he performed his own poems, which he had started to compose around 1920. One of the best received of these was ‘A Pit Pony’s Memory of the Strike’, during the industrial action of early 1921:

At last I’m on the surface; from the cage I’m led away,

They take the cover off my eyes; I see the light of day.

Later on my mates come up and then it came to pass,

They took us down into a field and turned us out to grass.

We held a meeting in that field, ’twas just beside a dyke

And we came to the conclusion that the pit must be on strike.

As Arthur’s reputation grew, he abandoned the secure existence at the colliery for a precarious living as a poet. Moving to the more cosmopolitan town of Swinton, he continued to sell his poems, and hosted local dances at which his elder daughter played the piano; sometimes he accompanied her on drums.

Barbara’s reputation was threatening to outstrip that of her father: she had by now performed in many of the towns of South Yorkshire, and twice at the BBC studio in Sheffield. In January 1926, passing her London College of Music examination, she seemed set for a career as a concert pianist. And then the family broke up.

Arthur’s success in his new occupation was in part achieved thanks to the attentions of higher-born ladies, to whose houses he was now invited – at which his wife Julia was hopelessly ill at ease. Just when he succumbed to temptation is unclear, but he almost certainly contracted syphilis before Julia decided to leave him. In February 1927, she and her daughters went back south to her family home in Hersham.

The biggest casualty of the arrangement was Barbara, whose musical ambitions were utterly ruined. At the age of eighteen, having to support an ailing mother and thirteen-year-old sister, she found work in a Surrey factory, making transformers. It was there that she met Ted Wells, an apprentice who, eager to better himself, was attending night school after a day’s work.

To boost her family’s meagre income and pay for Joan’s dancing lessons, Barbara taught the piano. By the turn of 1928, she had an extra burden to bear. Her wayward father, unable to look after himself any longer, turned up in Hersham. Riddled with syphilis and rendered almost insane, he brought into the house another disease to shadow his elder daughter for the latter part of her life: alcoholism.

He found work for a while as a metal polisher, but it was a hopeless case. On 31 August 1929, Arthur Morris died at Brookwood Mental Hospital, Woking, aged forty-two. The cause of death was given as ‘General Paralysis of the Insane’, which he had suffered for some ‘considerable duration’. Two years later, on 22 June 1931, Julia also died, only forty-four years old. The death certificate listed the horrors her husband had inflicted upon her, including tabes dorsalis: congenital syphilis. He had destroyed her, in more ways than one – but her Christian name would live on in the next generation.

Lack of money forced Barbara and Joan to move again and again, to ever-cheaper apartments. For each move, Ted Wells lent a helping hand, borrowing a builder’s handcart to carry their one valuable possession: a piano. At one stage, times were so hard for Barbara and her younger sister that Ted sold his motorcycle for £12 to help pay their rent. It was an enormous sacrifice: as a newly qualified handicrafts teacher, he needed to travel as much as forty miles to give lessons at schools in five different villages. He now had to cover the daily route by bicycle, his only consolation being that he rode through some of the most picturesque scenery in Surrey.

After Ted’s first term as an itinerant teacher, he and Barbara decided to wait no longer. On Boxing Day 1932, they were married at St Peter’s Church, Hersham, witnessed by Barbara’s maternal grandfather William Ward, and Ted’s mother Elizabeth Wells. On their joint earnings, they could just manage a rental of £1 a week for a prefabricated asbestos bungalow on the outskirts of town.

Joan’s dance training had begun to pay dividends, in the form of a small dance school in Hersham, with half-hour lessons costing only a shilling. These were held in the evening at a local preparatory school, and the enterprise was very much a team effort. Joan taught, Barbara provided piano accompaniment and Ted built the props and scenery. Often working until the early hours of the morning, he created pieces such as a twenty-four-foot model of the liner Queen Mary or an elaborate roundabout, his expertise bringing a touch of professionalism to the school shows.

Ted and Barbara Wells had now been married for over two years of grinding poverty. By living with Joan, they could just afford to support a family, so they moved to a three-bedroom, semi-detached brick house in the more fashionable Westcar Lane, Walton-on-Thames. They named the house ‘Threesome’.

Then, on 1 October 1935, Threesome became Foursome. The future Julie Andrews had arrived.

* * *

Born in a trunk Julia Elizabeth Wells may not have been – but the other hallmarks of a show-business childhood were all too apparent. A stage mother, for instance. Barbara Wells’ life revolved around the Joan Morris School of Dancing, and it was only a matter of time before the shows featured the proprietor’s little niece, who made her stage debut aged two, as a tiny fairy waving a wand.

In 1986, I met Julie Andrews for the first time at London’s National Film Theatre, where she spoke of her mother and aunt’s endeavours. ‘Between them, with my dad’s help, they used to put on these shows in my home town of Walton-on-Thames. One of my earliest memories is of peeing my pants on stage. I was about three.’

Her assurance, even at that age, was remarkable. At the local Walton Playhouse, performing a gavotte with another little girl, Julie took control of the dance when the top hat slipped over her partner’s eyes. The following year, wardrobe problems blighted her solo routine in the pageant Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod. Co-starring as Nod, Julie wore a white pyjama suit. At a climactic moment, the buttons burst open – exposing bright pink underpants. But, totally immersed in her song, she finished to huge applause.

‘Julie lived in a world peopled with fabulous, storybook characters,’ Barbara recalled. ‘She’d stand outside the door and cry, Now close your eyes – I’m coming in. Guess who I am. And in would walk Queen Bess or a pixie or a tough little boy. We always kept a prop box with stage clothes and accessories. It was Julie’s paradise.’

The precocious little girl did not attend an ordinary school. The decision was only partly to do with Barbara’s stage ambitions for her daughter. Although Ted Wells was employed by traditional schools, he was progressive in his attitude to education, believing in a more individual approach. He decided to teach his daughter at home.

It seemed to work. By the age of three, Julie could already read and write, and had started to acquire, from his reading to her each night, a love of poetry. Ted also introduced her to Père Castor’s whimsical adventure stories of animals and birds. These and The Little Grey Men, by an author known only as ‘BB’, a simple nature story of the last four gnomes left in England, set over the four seasons of the year, became lasting favourites.

The family belonged, nominally, to the Church of England, but was not particularly observant. In her seventieth year, Julie remembered her father as believing in nature more than anything, ‘that religion resides inside of you’. Above all, Ted shared with her his love and knowledge of natural history, teaching her the leaves of the trees and the songs of the birds, sailing with her in a hired boat on the nearby River Thames. At that stage of their lives both she and her brother John David, two and a half years younger, enjoyed a normal English childhood. ‘Cosy years,’ is how Julie later described them, ‘and all my memories of them are cosy.’

There was a time and a place for everything in Walton-on-Thames. On screen at the local Capitol Cinema good triumphed over evil, couples kept one foot on the ground when embracing and everyone went happily home to supper (a particular favourite of Julie’s being boiled potato sandwiches – ‘all squashy and dribbling butter’). Late in life, his daughter now one of the most famous women on the planet, Ted Wells retained a plaintive story she wrote at this time, of a mother’s longing for a little girl and boy: ‘It was Chrisms, the night Santer Claus hee came to bring the two babis.’ Naturally, the family lives ‘hapleevrovter’. Reality would prove otherwise. The Wells family would soon be split in two, and the happy little girl would suffer considerable torment – to what extent, she would do her best to ignore for over two decades.

* * *

In the long, hot summer of 1939, talk of war was everywhere. Yet, for little Julia Wells, there was no indication that the suburban security of her childhood was almost at an end. Ironically, the catalyst was a trip to the seaside. Barbara had been engaged for the season as pianist to the Dazzle Company, a music-hall variety troupe, in the south coast resort of Bognor Regis. In July, Ted joined Barbara and Joan and his children, to make it a complete family holiday. It would be their last. Precipitously, a member of the Dazzle Company was injured and had to leave the show. The replacement was a burly, ginger-haired, thirty-two-year-old tenor, styled ‘The Canadian Troubadour: Songs and a Guitar’. His name was Ted Andrews.

Each night, he was accompanied by attractive, flame-haired Barbara, three years his junior. But, before their professional relationship could become anything else, war with Germany was declared on Sunday 3 September, and the troupe was disbanded. The Wells family returned to Walton-on-Thames. Ted volunteered for the Royal Air Force, Barbara joined ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association (known colloquially as ‘Every Night Something Awful’), and Britain faced the eerie days of the phoney war, of gas masks and panicky air-raid alerts.

A rush to evacuate schoolchildren to the countryside convulsed the country. Ted, waiting to hear from the RAF, was delegated to transfer evacuees from Surrey. While Barbara performed her initial concerts for ENSA, Julie and John were tended by Aunt Joan. Then, along with thousands of others, they were displaced from their home, evacuated to a riding school in Kent, where Julie had what she remembered as ‘a glorious time’.

ENSA, meanwhile, had also recruited the Canadian Troubadour. By accident or design, Barbara found herself in the same unit as her Dazzle Company colleague. This time, the inevitable happened, and the seven-year marriage of Mr and Mrs Wells was shattered.

As the injured party, Ted was awarded custody of both his children – but, in the most agonising decision of his life, he waived the right over Julie. One reason was his failure to be accepted for RAF aircrew. His war effort would be in running a factory at Hinchley Wood in Surrey, working for up to seventy-two hours at a stretch – on one occasion, arriving home so tired that he fell asleep with his head in a bowl of porridge. ‘With the war work taking up so much of my time,’ he later wrote, ‘I could not do my duty to both of them as a father.’

Ted felt that ‘a growing girl needed a mother’s influence’, but it was a second factor that had decided him. He recognised that Julie’s talent, if not her happiness, would be served by a career in show business, for which his wife and her lover were equipped to prepare her. Many years later, though, he revealed his doubts as to whether he had made the right decision, however unselfish: ‘I know separation from me and her brother John caused her a lot of suffering.’

In 1944, Ted Wells would remarry. His second wife, Winifred Birkhead, a former hairdresser and the widow of an RAF bomb-disposal expert, had come to his factory as a trainee lathe operator. A year later, they would have a daughter of their own, Celia.

Having lost two members of her family, Julia Elizabeth Wells also lost her home. The thin little five-year-old girl was now to live at 1 Mornington Crescent, in Camden Town, north London. Thirty years earlier, the brilliant artist Walter Sickert (suspected of having been Jack the Ripper) had lived at No 6. Even then, the street had been in decline. By the time Ted Andrews and Barbara took rooms in the corner building, backing on to the railway tracks from Euston Station, it was a grimy, unfashionable location.

Instead of the leafy views of Surrey, Julie now looked out at a mammoth, quasi-Egyptian temple, the entrance flanked by two seven-foot bronze cats: the Carreras Factory, home of the famous Craven ‘A’ (‘for your throat’s sake’) cigarettes. While her stepfather was still alive, Julie laid her ambivalence aside to recall ‘the bleak turn of events: I hated my new house and the man who seemed to fill it.’

Compared to the quiet, thoughtful Ted Wells, the other Ted, ‘with a personality as colourful and noisy as show business itself’, seemed an unbearable substitute. Even his singing ‘made the tooth-mugs jump on the bathroom shelves’. Barbara suggested that she call him ‘Uncle Ted’, but Julie remained stubbornly determined to resist him.

The lovers had formed a variety act, with which they would eventually tour the country from Brighton to Aberdeen. As Barbara later described it, ‘We were never top of the bill. After all, we were musical and not comedy, and the comedians got the best billing. But we were the second feature, a good supporting act with a drawing-room set and ballads – nice, family-type entertainment.’

For the moment, their work for ENSA was very badly paid. And there would soon be another mouth to feed. In July 1942, Barbara gave birth to a son, Donald Edward, in the comparative haven of Rodney House, Walton-on-Thames, where her elder two children had been born.

Although Ted and Barbara marketed themselves as a respectable family couple, they were not yet married. Clearly, Ted Wells had not pursued the issue of divorce until Barbara’s new baby meant the separation was irreparable. On 25 October 1942, he petitioned against her, naming Ted Andrews as co-respondent. It was usual in those days for the woman to petition, but Wells had been too much of a gentleman already. While unmarried mothers in the Second World War were common enough, at thirty-two Barbara was older than most. With no legal commitment from Ted Andrews, she was in a very uncertain position indeed – as was her daughter, who was fast learning the need for self-reliance.

As if to illustrate the point, the Blitz lit up the skies on a nightly basis. Whenever the sirens moaned, Barbara and ‘Uncle Ted’, with baby Donald and Julie in tow, would dash across to Mornington Crescent station. ‘Incendiaries were dropping all over the place,’ Julie told me, ‘and I do have fairly good memories of going down into the Underground and witnessing some of the scenes that Henry Moore depicted so brilliantly in his graphics of the time.’

Down in the bowels of London, they would sometimes remain all night on the platform with dozens of other Londoners. As the small hours edged towards morning, Ted would entertain the huddled crowd with songs on his guitar. During one air raid, he realised he had left his instrument behind. Before anyone could stop him, he ran out of the shelter, Barbara rushing behind. Julie was left alone in the crowd with baby Donald in his carry-cot, listening to the bombs thundering above, fearing the worst. Then the couple reappeared, the Canadian Troubadour provided songs and a guitar, and Julie buried yet another bad scare – for the time being.

When Ted and Barbara were out on tour with ENSA, a nanny would look after the two children, sending Julie out to buy packets of cigarettes. The seven-year-old would cadge one and do her best to inhale, remembering, ‘I’d sneak behind the bathroom door and think I was no end of a clever girl.’ On other occasions, they would slip into the famous old Bedford Theatre in Camden High Street. The rowdy music-hall atmosphere would be part of Julie’s own life all too soon. In 1942, as the war began to tilt in the Allies’ favour, she began classes at the Cone Ripman (later Arts Educational) stage school in Upper Grosvenor Street, Mayfair.

The following year, Ted and Barbara were at last earning enough to rent a ground-floor flat (with its own basement air-raid shelter) at 29 Clarendon Street, Pimlico. Julie’s mother still registered herself as Barbara Wells, but on 25 November 1943, only three days after her divorce was made final, she and Edward Vernon Andrews were finally married, in Westminster City Register Office. The ceremony was witnessed by Barbara’s sister Joan, herself now married, although her husband, Bill Wilby, was at that time an RAF prisoner-of-war. Joan lived in a small flat nearby, where Julie and Donald stayed whenever ENSA concerts kept their parents out of town.

Ted and Barbara Andrews were frantically busy, saving as much as they could to buy a home of their own. By the end of 1943, they had scraped together enough to put down a deposit on 15 Cromwell Road, Beckenham, ten miles south-east of central London, on the edge of Kent. Money now also stretched – just – to pay for Julie’s fees at the private Woodbrook Girls’ School in Hayne Road, where for two years she received what she would call ‘some of the best schooling in my life’. But even as she became used to this more stable environment, the threat of bombing proved greater than ever, as she would recall: ‘The doodlebugs began arriving while we lived in Beckenham, and it was terrifying to look up into the sky and see and hear one of those rockets coming down.’ The droning sound would be followed by a sudden, fearful silence, as the missile plummeted to earth.

Beckenham lay directly under one of the main air routes into London. ‘Julie, then eight, would arm herself with a whistle, stand on the mound and keep a look out,’ said her mother. One day, Julie was staring into the sky so fixedly that she forgot to sound the alert; the flying bomb landed a matter of yards from the